This disclosure relates generally to printing apparatus and methods for printing. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to printing apparatus and methods for printing in a print shop.
Various production systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and dashboards are highly dependent upon data about the production environment. Such fully integrated systems implement a computerized and networked system to collect data from the various pieces of equipment in the shop. The problem is that not all pieces of equipment in a typical shop are or can be connected to a computer. Additionally, print shop workflows typically include many manual operations. As such, large amounts of data must be manually captured and entered into the systems after the fact. Process data that is not manually captured and entered into the system is simply lost through non-capture. Typical solutions for manual data capture, such as paper job tickets are labor-intensive, costly and not timely.
Integration of the equipment and processes utilized in production printing operations requires communication of job information from a centralized Management Information System (MIS) to each one of the pieces of equipment in the print shop as well as collection of job status information and resource consumption information from the processes to the MIS. Achieving this level of integration is difficult due to the lack of standards and common interfaces among the multiple pieces of equipment used in any typical print shop. Some advances have been made with respect to standards with the adoption of Job Definition Format (JDF). However, this standard has not yet been adopted across all manufacturers of print shop equipment. Even with complete adoption of the standard, manual processes and legacy equipment will still present problems.
Conventional solutions to this problem have included installing computer systems in each of the process workstations and requiring operators to enter information about the job being processed. Such manual data collection usually happens after the fact once the operator has finished processing a job. This process typically requires much operator interaction, such as searching for the correct record, tabbing to the correct field in the record, etc., and is therefore time consuming, distracting the skilled operators from the value added tasks of processing the job instructions. The level of integration and the amount of information that can be communicated using this solution is also limited by conventional keyboard methodologies.